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newsoundwave | 13 years ago

While I agree with the sentiment, the current "competitors" that have shown up are either equally twitchy about TOS violations [1], have abysmally poor performance in many areas of the world (again I'm referring to ustream.tv), or are basically scams[2].

They've also been pretty good about talking to people about their TOS violations and reverting bans if necessary [3].

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/04/tech/web/hugo-awards-gaiman-us... [2] http://www.destiny.gg/n/own3d-tv-a-beginners-guide-to-being-... [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1bqum7/just... *

* Random link I found by looking for twitch.tv restoring accounts. I know there have ones where it wasn't twitch.tv's fault including recently a DOTA 2/SC2 caster, I just can't remember where he posted his stuff.

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nolok|13 years ago

> have abysmally poor performance in many areas of the world

Twitch in europe still sometimes have horrible performance too. I don't know if this is a peering issue to french ISP or something, but every major tournament I watch I have to use 240p at some point or another because it lags like hell. And everytime you mention it being in their chat or reddit, you get a swarm of users telling you "no it works for me", "it's probably your bandwidth", ...

I was sad when own3d closed because they always had great performance for me, some people said "but they suck in country X" but hey, that's exactly like twitch for me.

Worst part is, I would glady have suscribed to tons of "720p for paying users only" starcraft 2 content if it was working.

emmett|13 years ago

Yeah, this is rough for us. We want perfect global service and don't have it. There are issues in many locales, mostly because of last-mile delivery.

We're doubling EU capacity now, because every time we add capacity we grow until it's all used up. Which is no compensation to you, I realize, but that's what's going on.

(I'm the CEO of Twitch)

newsoundwave|13 years ago

Well yeah, I get the whole 240p on twitch (I'm a little bit better - like 480p or something). I'm talking about how when I would be in the US or Korea even the lowest bitrate option refused to play past slideshow speed. It's also the only one my friends in other countries actively complain to me about (since I'm the "computer guy" for them).

And yeah own3d had nice performance but it's understandably simpler to get good performance when you're not paying any of your contracts.

As for your last comment, I've gone back to GOM since their video quality has gotten better over time.

In relation to the article, yes it would be great if either Twitch beefed up their performance and had a clear way to contest ToS violations, but there have been quite a few competitors to Twitch and all of them have given me far more reasons to actively distrust them than to trust them over Twitch. I don't stream video games but if I did I couldn't see myself on any competitor right now.

Maybe Google could try their hand at something like that? They obviously can do live streaming decently well (although Youtube's speed has decreased for me greatly in the last few months).